Chapter 44: The Air Force's Shortcomings

The closed beta period for Legend was very brief, lasting only about ten days. The testing was also limited to a handful of internet cafés within the city of Qiantang, as well as three other major cities nearby: Hujiang, the neighboring provincial capital Jinling, and the surrounding metropolitan area. As for distributing activation codes online, that was put on hold for now—after all, not many people would scramble for the chance to play a game for just half a month; even the players themselves felt it wasn’t worth the effort.

The partnered internet cafés in each city were all personally visited by Gu Cheng himself or by the few managers and sales staff at Legend Entertainment. They’d slip a few cartons of cigarettes to the café owners, pre-install the closed beta client on every machine, put up promotional posters at the entrance, and encourage the customers to try out the new game. If players encountered any issues, they were urged to click and submit a bug report.

Legend Entertainment also offered testing stipends to the café owners, based on the value of the data their cafés collected during the beta. This tactic further spurred the owners’ enthusiasm for recommending Legend—almost everyone who came to use a machine would get a reminder: “Hey, there’s a new online game called Legend. It’s free to play for now. Want to give it a try?”

Everything was done in a race against time.

When the National Day holiday arrived, Legend finally entered a month-and-a-half-long closed beta with data wipes.

During this period, aside from attending classes, Pan Jieying was busy helping her mother and cousin secure loans. Their family homes and company properties had already been mortgaged, raising over 600,000 yuan in loans. Most of this money was funneled into advertising for the game—300,000 was splurged on “Popular Software” magazine, 100,000 on “Computer News,” and the remainder went toward posters, online ads, and marketing expenses.

In particular, for “Popular Software,” Gu Cheng requested not only color advertisements for Legend but also demanded that every issue include feature articles, walkthroughs, and continuous media saturation all the way through the end of the year. Since the magazine was already focused on computer game guides, publishing “paid news” was more profitable than mere advertising.

The reason he was willing to invest so heavily in print media was entirely because Gu Cheng had taken his cousin’s earlier research to heart: at that time, the majority of potential online gamers didn’t have computers at home. Their time at the keyboard was precious—every hour in the internet café cost four yuan, and they spent it all on gaming, rarely browsing forums or websites.

For these players, all the steps of “looking up guides” or “checking game news” happened in the school library. In the year 2000, books like “Popular Software” were perennially checked out in school libraries. Even if some libraries didn’t allow borrowing, students would dash to claim them after class, more eagerly than they lined up for the cafeteria.

Moreover, if someone managed to grab any other book, the rest would usually give up. But with “Popular Software” and similar guides, even after someone took the book, others would crowd around to read over their shoulder. In those days, whenever you saw a huddle of students around a book in the reading room, nine times out of ten, it was a game guide.

“Popular Software” had ceased publication by the time Gu Cheng was just starting elementary school in the future. If not for his cousin’s down-to-earth advice, he would never have thought of such grassroots marketing channels, given his own background in the purely online “air force” approach.

The National Day holiday passed quickly, and mid-October arrived in the blink of an eye.

Legend’s closed beta had now been running for half a month.

At that time, “Popular Software” was still a biweekly publication, so Legend had already been featured in two issues, with YouxiaNet and Yaoxia Mountain working hard on promotion as well.

Thanks to effective marketing, the game soon surpassed 10,000 concurrent users and 150,000 registered accounts. At this rate, by the end of the month there was a real chance of reaching 30,000 concurrent users and 500,000 accounts.

As the new generation’s flagship MMORPG, Legend had encountered virtually no competition so far, staking its claim in the market for two glorious weeks.

Until October 18th.

On the eighteenth day of Legend’s closed beta, Gu Cheng spotted a batch of industry news on Yaoxia Mountain’s gaming website.

“Dongyi’s heavyweight professional MMORPG ‘Dragon Clan’ launches with a bang in Huaxia! Distributed by Hujiang Shengda, with investment from Taiwan’s Acer Xigu. Activation codes available starting today, limited closed beta!”

“Riding the wave of Legend’s popular closed beta, domestic internet giants have turned their attention to importing Dongyi online games. According to insiders, two other games with proven market potential in Dongyi—‘Millennium’ and ‘Red Moon’—may be brought in by mysterious domestic investors before year’s end.”

“Pioneering domestic MMORPG ‘Stone Age’ is set to release a new expansion, countering competition from RTS-style MMORPGs.”

So, was a truly similar competitor finally stepping onto the stage?

Gu Cheng immediately dug into related news and rumors, soon piecing together Chen Tianqiao’s moves.

Sure enough—thanks to Gu Cheng’s own butterfly effect, Chen, unable to acquire Legend, had turned instead to Dragon Clan.

But Shengda lacked the funds to purchase the expensive rights to Dragon Clan, so in the end, Chen teamed up with the equally ambitious Acer Xigu from Taiwan, trading a portion of Shengda’s equity in exchange for a multimillion-yuan investment from Acer.

Gu Cheng had never feared competition, but neither was he ever complacent.

Once Dragon Clan’s closed beta began, he immediately instructed his company’s sole market researcher to monitor the competition’s every move and report back daily.

…

Liu Shuqin was Pan Jieying’s roommate, a first-year MBA student at Qianjiang University. Her original major was marketing—which, to be honest, was a field where the little theory taught in class was of almost no practical use.

Although she and Pan Jieying had studied different majors as undergraduates, they were in the same department and became much closer after entering grad school together.

Now that Legend Entertainment was expanding rapidly and expenses were high, with an unknown brand and difficulty attracting top talent, Pan Jieying turned to her circle of classmates and girlfriends for help—she applied to her advisor to have students conduct research, with Legend Entertainment providing modest funding.

The advisor readily agreed, even bundling it into a market research project on the online gaming industry, which could later be used to apply for research funds.

That was how Liu Shuqin got roped in. With an 800-yuan monthly stipend, no restrictions on her schedule, she just needed to gather information, conduct market research, and write reports.

She cherished this internship opportunity and was determined to do her best. The report she presented today was the result of several sleepless nights and extensive research.

“President Gu, here’s the competitive analysis report you requested.”

After knocking, Liu Shuqin entered Gu Cheng’s office, holding the report with both hands and placing it gently on his desk.

Gu Cheng didn’t look up right away; he finished typing a string of text on his computer before finally reacting.

“Oh, you’ve completed the comparative analysis between Legend and Dragon Clan? Not bad—sit down, I’ll take a look.”

Glancing at the table of contents, Gu Cheng was quite satisfied.

A comprehensive competitor report should always include market research and a differentiation analysis, but the latter was usually handled by the technical support department rather than marketing. Liu Shuqin’s diligence showed real initiative.

Gu Cheng read through it carefully. According to the report, within just a few days of Dragon Clan’s closed beta, its growth trend in major city markets was already on par with Legend.

As expected, Dragon Clan held undeniable appeal for more experienced players.

The straightforward, rough-hewn style of Legend had its own hard limitations in this respect, and Gu Cheng had no intention of changing it.

Since he had committed to Legend, he was determined to follow the “rural areas surrounding the cities” strategy—win over the novices, win the world.

Most of the data in the latter half of the report matched his initial forecasts.

But when he reached the end, something unsettled him.

“Hm? What do you mean by this final projection? Why do you think Legend’s conversion rate for paying users poses a major problem?” Gu Cheng pointed to a section in the report, his expression darkening.

Liu Shuqin blanched, stammering, “Oh? President Gu, do you think there’s an issue with my analysis? I drew my conclusions based on our current company data and competitors targeting similar user categories, combined with channel statistics.”

“Then why do you believe that Legend’s advantage in third- and fourth-tier cities will lead to a lower future conversion rate for paying users?”

“Because that’s the pattern we saw with NetThree and Stone Age before. Their target markets lacked proper distribution channels for prepaid game cards. Most newsstand owners in fourth-tier cities wouldn’t stock game cards due to unstable sales, so players in remote areas had great difficulty obtaining them—which leads me to believe, when facing Dragon Clan’s competition, Legend’s outlook may not be so optimistic.” As she spoke, Liu Shuqin hurriedly flipped to several pages in her report, pointing out the evidence for Gu Cheng to review.

“Is it really possible for someone to want to play a game but be unable to buy a game card? My god—what kind of primitive era is this! Just buy a card on Taob—oh, right, that doesn’t exist yet.”

Fortunately, Gu Cheng only muttered this internally, not aloud.

He realized, once again, how foreign this era still was to him. He would need to invest much more time to adapt to the primitive ways people did business.

At this point, he felt like a pre-artificial intelligence era computer—immensely capable at processing and solving problems, but lacking the means to define or discover issues on his own, still reliant on those around him for reminders.